P. Z. Myers<\/a> has seen the dark side of skepticism, the fact that its tools can be applied not just to fringe bunk but to anything and everything. And so he has written in an effort to distinguish science and skepticism. Here is an excerpt from his recent post on the topic<\/a>:<\/p>\n A short while ago, I received a\u00a0very nice letter from a young woman in Indiana<\/a>\u00a0who liked my book. I scanned it and posted it, with her name and town redacted \u2014 it was a lovely example of a phenomenon we\u2019ve noticed for quite some time, of the way the internet and books about atheism have opened the door for many people who had previously felt isolated. It also said kind things about\u00a0The Happy Atheist<\/em><\/a>, so of course I was glad to share it.<\/p>\n Some nut named Cavanaugh, in the name of True Atheism and Skepticism, has posted a\u00a0lengthy dissection of the letter<\/a>. He doesn\u2019t believe it\u2019s real. He thinks I wrote it myself. To prove his point, all he has is the scan I posted\u2026so he has taken it apart at excruciating and obsessive length. He has carefully snipped out all the letters \u201cw\u201d in the letter, lining them up so you can easily compare them. My god, they\u2019re not identical! He has another figure in which he has sliced out a collection of ligatures \u2014 would you believe the spacing between letters, in a handwritten letter, is not consistent? She used the word \u201coblivious\u201d a couple of times\u2026a word that I also have used many times. She wrote exactly one page, not two. He mansplains the psychology of teenaged girls to assert that there\u2019s no way a 15-year-old woman could have written the letter. You get the idea. He is being properly skeptical, accumulating a body of \u201cfacts\u201d to disprove the possibility that someone in Indiana actually wrote a letter\u2026<\/p>\n When your whole business model is simply about rejecting fringe claims, rather than following the evidence no matter how mainstream the target, you\u2019ll inevitably end up with a pathologically skewed audience that uses motivated reasoning to abuse the weak.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Skepticism is invoked to deny the reality of Bigfoot and alien abductions and Intelligent Design<\/a>. And skepticism<\/a> is invoked to deny climate change and that Al-Qaeda was responsible for 9\/11 and the Holocaust and much else<\/a>. And each side insists that it is just applying the methods of skepticism<\/a> to dare to challenge what the world\u2019s experts say.<\/p>\n Clearly we need more than \u201cskepticism<\/a>\u201d to get us to an accurate portrait of reality.<\/p>\n